Inside and Gorogoa are now available to pre-order on the App Store, in what appears to be a brand new system Apple has rolled out to allow people to pre-order upcoming iOS games and apps: [toucharcade.com] by @hodapp

It’s presumably intended as a workaround for devices going from 60% to shutdown in a few minutes after the iOS 10 update, but I’m gonna be hard-pressed for arguments the next time someone cries “planned obsolescence.”

9 December

I’ll reconsider when Monster Hunter has a photo safari mode. I don’t even understand how they can spend so much time designing and animating all those creatures and not want to offer more peaceful interactions.

8 December

Most sane company valuations are 10x-20x revenue, with 20x being a high-end for desirable acquihires by Google/etc. Under that math, Patreon should be worth $80-$160 million. Yet they raised at $450m. 56x revenue! This means they’re under intense pressure to increase $$$. 2/10

Here’s what I think is happening with @Patreon - this year they raised $60m in Series C venture funds at a valuation of $450 million (after raising $30m last year and more than doubling the company’s size - almost always a mistake). Yet they make about $8 million per year. 1/10

If you weren’t enough of a risk-taker to buy bitcoin at $30, you also aren’t enough of a risk-taker to not have sold it the minute you had multiplied your holdings ten-fold, so don’t beat yourself up over hypotheticals

It’s funny how we were all a little worried about High Sierra’s switch to APFS and it seems to be the only thing they didn’t screw up. (Talking general OS reliability, not mis-attributed UI fields in Disk Utility.)

I honestly find it pretty troubling how much of the reporting of the Disney-Fox acquisition is just squee over the Marvel possibilities rather than real concern over the insidious nature of a growing media monopoly.

In summary: ten years ago bankers gambled with all our money, lost most of it, caused a global financial crisis, which resulted in austerity, that was manipulated into anti-migrant rage by billionaire tax-exile press-barons, revitalised the far right and brought Trump and Brexit.

It’s just like that old saying; “Do what you love for a living and the increasingly unclear distinction between your personal and professional identity will make it extremely difficult to feel emotionally secure at basically any point in the process”

5 December

I’m trialling a new experimental laptop from Apple. The return of USB-A and SD Card slot is genius. Touch screen and pencil support is surprisingly useful. Touch bar is gone but I won’t miss it. Face ID is 👌

4 December

One of my favorite samples from the Progressive GANs paper is this one from the “cat” category. Apparently some of the cat training photos were memes with text. The GAN doesn’t know what text is so it has made up new text-like imagery in the right place for a meme caption.

My daughter is 5. I don’t want her to have this, and I don’t want her friends to badger her into getting it. This is expanding the Network Effect of Facebook (& all its concomitant pitfalls) into childhood. It’s gross. [twitter.com]

3 December

Fuck. It just dawned on me that my four-year-old MacBook Pro has been swelling over the last few weeks. (Or much longer if my issues with the trackpad’s button were the first symptom.) It’s awesome because I’m kinda broke right now.

2 December

We can disagree on how much time the devs should have spent on comfort options (there are none) but I don’t think it’s acceptable for a third-person game in VR to let the camera jump up when the character steps on a fucking pebble.

I reflexively installed 11.2 as soon as I saw it was available. What could go wrong. It’s not like they also rushed that update overnight, to fix a bug that was putting thousands of phones in a reboot loop.

29 November

BREAKING: American Airlines says computer glitch allowed all pilots to take vacation over Christmas week. Now union says thousands of flights are in jeopardy of cancellation. Americans says they’re offering 1.5x pay for pilots to fill in and expect to resolve the issue.